4 ms·

> We once fired a programmer and had her turn over her code after she failed to turn any work in after a few months How did that go un-noticed for months?

by colmvp 6y ago

watwut 6y ago
We had something similar with a dude. Went "unnoticed" for months, then moved around teams doing nothing in multiple for months.
mercer 6y ago
We had a guy who, after a month of sitting smack-dab in the center of the IT department being busy on his new MacBook, got caught with his pants down because he finally asked for help, and me and a bunch of other devs stood behind him watched in horror as we discovered that not only did he know nothing about programming, he didn't know /any/ keyboard shortcuts. When we asked him to copy some code from one file to another, he'd click on 'edit' and 'copy', struggle to get to the other file, and then click on 'edit' and 'paste'. How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting. He slipped through the cracks because he got hired into another department, and when they found out that he'd worked as a 'developer' at Microsoft they figured he'd be more useful in our department. In hindsight I feel I should've known something wasn't quite right when every time I walked past his brand-new MacBook, he seemed to /really/ be struggling with something and it never looked like it was code. I imagine he spent the entire month figuring out how to deal with not having a 'start' button. EDIT: I'll add that while this was in my top 10 of worst situations, there are many others that, for me, provided a convincing argument against the idea that corporations are somehow more efficient or whatever than the government. My experience with both the public and private sector, beyond a certain size at least, is that they're largely similar in wastefulness/inefficiency/idiocy/etc.
- rtlfe 6y ago
  > How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting. I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? Does the company do code review? Wouldn't it be considered odd that the person wasn't sharing any code to be reviewed? It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Yeah, the problem is that you need a marginally decent company to make all of this work.
  - chiph 6y ago
    Back during the dot-com era, we hired someone (and paid for their relocation across the country!) who didn't know how to code. We were a VB6/COM shop at the time and they spent easily 3 days on a simple if..else statement before someone noticed. To their credit, the company was generous with the severance. There were a couple of reasons why this happened. Firstly because at the time, companies were hiring anyone who could spell "programming". There was this huge shortage of talent. And secondly, everyone was too busy and tired from 14+ hour days to have done a proper interview.
  - bane 6y ago
    > It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company. Yes. In almost every case I've seen it seems to come down to a localized culture/management issue in the area where the person works. Usually fixed on a particularly terrible senior manager who has the clout and connections to distract from the problem while problem employees fester forever.
  - mercer 6y ago
    > I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Yes and yes. I suppose he also lied to get his previous job as a 'programmer', or made the whole thing up. > Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? He'd been given time to 'get comfortable' and familiar with the codebase, and was left with some really minor tasks. I think management just forgot to check in with him after a week or so, and everyone else around assumed he was busy working on something. Quite a few freelancers in the department who sort of just did their own thing. > It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company. Maybe. I remember that particular time being really busy because of some big feature that was about to be deployed and, as I mentioned, it was quite common for freelancers to come and go and work on things that didn't really involve the rest of the team. I think it wasn't really a serious culture/management problem, but more a consequence of the fact that he came from another department after someone discovered that he was a 'programmer', bypassing the usual process. When I started at this company I got some time to get comfortable too, but I was hired to work on something specific, so the manager in charge of that came up to me pretty soon.
- onionisafruit 6y ago
  That’s what I felt like when ai joined a company that issued me a macbook for the first time. There’s nothing quite like demonstrating your code to somebody and having the conversation turn into a tutorial on cmd vs ctrl keys. It was probably only a week or two before I had it mostly worked out, but the imposter syndrome was pretty bad for a while. I can imagine falling into the same trap as the fellow in your story if I had trouble with the code too. At some point you start thinking that anything you say will out you so you just shut up and hope to delay the inevitable.
  - agustif 6y ago
    Been the same for me using a Windows PC on work having a Mac home. having different keymappings in different machines is hard
    - RulerOf 6y ago
      I was okay when I had the proper keyboard in front of me, but I still stumble with reflexively using the correct keys for shortcuts when I'm remote controlling one from the other. I've found it very difficult to use Ctrl+C to copy from Windows and then Cmd+V to paste on Mac OS without pretty frequently using the wrong modifier key.
      - agustif 6y ago
        Also, Hyper.app has ctrl+shift+v/c for copy paste, Git-ui has some weird shit like alt-shift-fn-c/v too LOL...
  - CM30 6y ago
    Same here. Started a company where employees had Macbooks to work on, and was all kinds of lost for the first few weeks because of it. Then again, that's still a problem even now, since switching between a PC and Mac on a fairly regular basis still leaves me a tad confused about the shortcuts and key bindings.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Happened to me at the start of the year, I chose macbook because reviews on 16" keyboard said not horrible and the rest of the team where already on it (and I had juniors to support). I resolved from day one to not fight the machine into behaving like Fedora instead learning the actual shortcuts (and I installed Rectangle). It took about a week before I was comfortable and a lot of that was remapping my IDE since I have extensive altered keybindings and shortcut keywords for that on linux. Once I accept it was just a unix with a different DE it wasn't so bad, messes me up more the other way I keep hitting alt+C etc on linux now.
jarym 6y ago
I was in a situation where it went NOTICED for months but the managers were too scared to fire him (a contractor so should have been easy) because there was some 'HR mess-up' that they were very cagey with details on.
- bane 6y ago
  Depending on the situation, subcontractors can also be extra hard to fire. If they were hired to fill out staff on a contract, they may be entitled to some kind of workshare percent and threaten breach of contract if you pull their terrible people off work without a replacement. Then they fail to produce a replacement in a timely fashion.
lr4444lr 6y ago
Makes me wonder if one of the major factors of agile methodology is simply that incompetent people can't hide behind a long predeploy process.
- bdavis__ 6y ago
  you have a point. allow me a counter. incompetent people can do little snippets of work for a sprint, and then get promoted. and be absolutely unable to deal with anything more complex that a small bit of functionality. after a couple of sprints, they have the 'chops' to become a manager, or a director, or an engineering VP.
tgv 6y ago
Probably by making the right noises in meetings. Quite some time ago, I worked in a company that hired a independent contractor for writing some non-trivial code (low level NLP) in C or C++ and interfacing it with a slightly opaque proprietary API. The guy came with an impeccable resume, or so we thought until we found out 6 weeks later that he'd been busy typing garbage, and not a lot of it either. He claimed these 100 to 200 lines were some form of design, but it was so utterly ridiculous that he was sent away immediately. I did have some experience with the API, and ended up with a working module of 2600 lines over a few days.
rcurry 6y ago
My favorite was the guy who would come into work, put his jacket on his chair, and then... go to his other full time job. He'd return in the evening to get his stuff and make it look like he'd been working long hours. He got away with it for almost a month.

> We once fired a programmer and had her turn over her code after she failed to turn any work in after a few months How did that go un-noticed for months?

by colmvp 6y ago

> We once fired a programmer and had her turn over her code after she failed to turn any work in after a few months How did that go un-noticed for months?

watwut 6y ago

We had something similar with a dude. Went "unnoticed" for months, then moved around teams doing nothing in multiple for months.

mercer 6y ago

We had a guy who, after a month of sitting smack-dab in the center of the IT department being busy on his new MacBook, got caught with his pants down because he finally asked for help, and me and a bunch of other devs stood behind him watched in horror as we discovered that not only did he know nothing about programming, he didn't know /any/ keyboard shortcuts. When we asked him to copy some code from one file to another, he'd click on 'edit' and 'copy', struggle to get to the other file, and then click on 'edit' and 'paste'. How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting. He slipped through the cracks because he got hired into another department, and when they found out that he'd worked as a 'developer' at Microsoft they figured he'd be more useful in our department. In hindsight I feel I should've known something wasn't quite right when every time I walked past his brand-new MacBook, he seemed to /really/ be struggling with something and it never looked like it was code. I imagine he spent the entire month figuring out how to deal with not having a 'start' button. EDIT: I'll add that while this was in my top 10 of worst situations, there are many others that, for me, provided a convincing argument against the idea that corporations are somehow more efficient or whatever than the government. My experience with both the public and private sector, beyond a certain size at least, is that they're largely similar in wastefulness/inefficiency/idiocy/etc.

rtlfe 6y ago
> How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting. I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? Does the company do code review? Wouldn't it be considered odd that the person wasn't sharing any code to be reviewed? It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Yeah, the problem is that you need a marginally decent company to make all of this work.
- chiph 6y ago
  Back during the dot-com era, we hired someone (and paid for their relocation across the country!) who didn't know how to code. We were a VB6/COM shop at the time and they spent easily 3 days on a simple if..else statement before someone noticed. To their credit, the company was generous with the severance. There were a couple of reasons why this happened. Firstly because at the time, companies were hiring anyone who could spell "programming". There was this huge shortage of talent. And secondly, everyone was too busy and tired from 14+ hour days to have done a proper interview.
- bane 6y ago
  > It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company. Yes. In almost every case I've seen it seems to come down to a localized culture/management issue in the area where the person works. Usually fixed on a particularly terrible senior manager who has the clout and connections to distract from the problem while problem employees fester forever.
- mercer 6y ago
  > I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Yes and yes. I suppose he also lied to get his previous job as a 'programmer', or made the whole thing up. > Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? He'd been given time to 'get comfortable' and familiar with the codebase, and was left with some really minor tasks. I think management just forgot to check in with him after a week or so, and everyone else around assumed he was busy working on something. Quite a few freelancers in the department who sort of just did their own thing. > It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company. Maybe. I remember that particular time being really busy because of some big feature that was about to be deployed and, as I mentioned, it was quite common for freelancers to come and go and work on things that didn't really involve the rest of the team. I think it wasn't really a serious culture/management problem, but more a consequence of the fact that he came from another department after someone discovered that he was a 'programmer', bypassing the usual process. When I started at this company I got some time to get comfortable too, but I was hired to work on something specific, so the manager in charge of that came up to me pretty soon.
onionisafruit 6y ago
That’s what I felt like when ai joined a company that issued me a macbook for the first time. There’s nothing quite like demonstrating your code to somebody and having the conversation turn into a tutorial on cmd vs ctrl keys. It was probably only a week or two before I had it mostly worked out, but the imposter syndrome was pretty bad for a while. I can imagine falling into the same trap as the fellow in your story if I had trouble with the code too. At some point you start thinking that anything you say will out you so you just shut up and hope to delay the inevitable.
- agustif 6y ago
  Been the same for me using a Windows PC on work having a Mac home. having different keymappings in different machines is hard
  - RulerOf 6y ago
    I was okay when I had the proper keyboard in front of me, but I still stumble with reflexively using the correct keys for shortcuts when I'm remote controlling one from the other. I've found it very difficult to use Ctrl+C to copy from Windows and then Cmd+V to paste on Mac OS without pretty frequently using the wrong modifier key.
    - agustif 6y ago
      Also, Hyper.app has ctrl+shift+v/c for copy paste, Git-ui has some weird shit like alt-shift-fn-c/v too LOL...
- CM30 6y ago
  Same here. Started a company where employees had Macbooks to work on, and was all kinds of lost for the first few weeks because of it. Then again, that's still a problem even now, since switching between a PC and Mac on a fairly regular basis still leaves me a tad confused about the shortcuts and key bindings.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Happened to me at the start of the year, I chose macbook because reviews on 16" keyboard said not horrible and the rest of the team where already on it (and I had juniors to support). I resolved from day one to not fight the machine into behaving like Fedora instead learning the actual shortcuts (and I installed Rectangle). It took about a week before I was comfortable and a lot of that was remapping my IDE since I have extensive altered keybindings and shortcut keywords for that on linux. Once I accept it was just a unix with a different DE it wasn't so bad, messes me up more the other way I keep hitting alt+C etc on linux now.

jarym 6y ago

I was in a situation where it went NOTICED for months but the managers were too scared to fire him (a contractor so should have been easy) because there was some 'HR mess-up' that they were very cagey with details on.

bane 6y ago
Depending on the situation, subcontractors can also be extra hard to fire. If they were hired to fill out staff on a contract, they may be entitled to some kind of workshare percent and threaten breach of contract if you pull their terrible people off work without a replacement. Then they fail to produce a replacement in a timely fashion.

lr4444lr 6y ago

Makes me wonder if one of the major factors of agile methodology is simply that incompetent people can't hide behind a long predeploy process.

bdavis__ 6y ago
you have a point. allow me a counter. incompetent people can do little snippets of work for a sprint, and then get promoted. and be absolutely unable to deal with anything more complex that a small bit of functionality. after a couple of sprints, they have the 'chops' to become a manager, or a director, or an engineering VP.

tgv 6y ago

Probably by making the right noises in meetings. Quite some time ago, I worked in a company that hired a independent contractor for writing some non-trivial code (low level NLP) in C or C++ and interfacing it with a slightly opaque proprietary API. The guy came with an impeccable resume, or so we thought until we found out 6 weeks later that he'd been busy typing garbage, and not a lot of it either. He claimed these 100 to 200 lines were some form of design, but it was so utterly ridiculous that he was sent away immediately. I did have some experience with the API, and ended up with a working module of 2600 lines over a few days.

rcurry 6y ago

My favorite was the guy who would come into work, put his jacket on his chair, and then... go to his other full time job. He'd return in the evening to get his stuff and make it look like he'd been working long hours. He got away with it for almost a month.